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WORK TITLE: The Icon and the Idealist
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://stephaniegorton.com/
CITY: Providence
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COUNTRY: United States
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LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Held editorial roles at Canongate Books, The Overlook Press, and Open Road.
AWARDS:Recipient of fellowships from the Logan Nonfiction Program at the Carey Institute for Global Good and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Paris Review Daily.
SIDELIGHTS
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Stephanie Gorton is an editor and writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her early books have focused on U.S. history, particularly of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has also worked as an editor, both at publishing houses and in freelance roles.
Gorton’s debut book was Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine That Rewrote America. It focuses on the founding of the progressive McClure’s magazine in 1893 and the impact it made on both politics and society. At one point, the magazine had over 400,000 readers, and it investigated industrialists and politicians, attracting the ire of both. Theodore Roosevelt was criticizing McClure’s when he denounced journalists as muckrakers, and an investigation launched by McClure’s led to the breakup of Standard Oil, the largest monopoly of its time. Gorton focuses on the magazine’s founder, S. S. McClure, and its most fearless journalist, Ida Tarbell, as well as what led to Tarbell leaving the publication in 1906 and McClure losing control of the magazine in 1911.
In Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, Richard Hughes described the book as “accessible biographies” that reveal “McClure’s seminal role in creating Progressive Era journalism.” Hughes notes that unlike other historical accounts of the era, Gorton reveals “the rise of Progressive reform from the perspectives of the writers and editors themselves.” He particularly appreciates Gorton’s analysis of the new kind of journalism McClure’s pioneered, which combined “rigorous field research, analysis, and activism for a new age.” Donna Seaman, in Booklist, also enjoyed this historical account, writing that “Gorton tells the complex, entwined stories of these two ardent innovators” and offers “incisive portraits” of other journalists who wrote for the magazine. The result is a book that “affirms the essential role of an independent press.” Writing in the Washington Post, Dennis Drabelle called the book “smart and illuminating.”
Gorton’s next work was The Icon & the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America. Again, Gorton focuses on two historical figures whose lives were intertwined. She also discusses how the birth control movement did not start in the 1960s but fifty years before that, as Sanger looked to start Planned Parenthood while Dennett founded the National Birth Control League. Gorton describes how the personal rivalry between the two women was rooted in different approaches as well as a clash of cultures, and was also connected to the battle for women’s suffrage.
Clara Bingham, in the International New York Times, called the book a “gripping double biography” and “riveting history” that “skillfully depicts the grueling decades-long struggle” both Sanger and Dennett undertook to make birth control legal. Bingham described Gorton’s account as “suspenseful” and also a “haunting reminder that, a century later, women are still battling the entrenched forces of misogyny.” Bingham also noted that both women unfortunately saw political advantage in allying with the growing eugenics movement. “A timely contribution to a virulent debate” is how a contributor in Kirkus Reviews described the book. They praised it as “an informative history of the fight for women’s reproductive rights.”
Gorton has credited the historian Megan Marshall for offering advice that has helped her in her writing. As Gorton said in an interview in Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, Marshall once told her, “Find out what happened when, in a very precise way, and then set the story going.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2020, Donna Seaman, review of Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine That Rewrote America, p. 4.
International New York Times, December 28, 2024, Clara Bingham, “Birth Control’s (First) Civil War,” review of The Icon & the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America, p. BR12.
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2019, review of Citizen Reporters; November 1, 2024, review of The Icon & the Idealist.
Publishers Weekly, September 9, 2019, review of Citizen Reporters, p. 54.
Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, Spring, 2021, Richard Hughes, review of Citizen Reporters, pp. 37+.
Washington Post, February 21, 2020, Dennis Drabelle, “Book World: America Needed Their Journalism; They Needed Each Other,” review of Citizen Reporters.
ONLINE
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, https://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (November 29, 2024), author interview.
Rhode Island Monthly, https://www.rimonthly.com/ (February 20, 2020), Casey Nilsson, author interview.
Stephanie Gorton website, https://stephaniegorton.com/ (February 20, 2025).
Stephanie Gorton wrote The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry that Brought Birth Control to America (2024) and Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America (2020), a finalist for the Sperber Prize for journalism biography. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Paris Review Daily, among other publications, and she has appeared on radio shows including On Point and Slate Political Gabfest.
Previously, she held editorial roles at Canongate Books, The Overlook Press, and Open Road, and fellowships with the Logan Nonfiction Program at the Carey Institute for Global Good and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Lebanese American by birth, Gorton lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Friday, November 29, 2024
Q&A with Stephanie Gorton
Photo by Sasha Israel
Stephanie Gorton is the author of the new book The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America. She also has written the book Citizen Reporters. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Q: What inspired you to write The Icon and the Idealist, and how was the book’s title chosen?
A: Two forces pulled me into the story: the fascinating central relationship between Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett, and my consuming interest in reproductive rights activism.
Sanger and Dennett essentially launched the very first movement for reproductive rights in America. Questions of faith, the law, ethics, medical protocols, and beliefs about gender roles flared up in the battle for birth control, just as they now do in arguments over abortion.
We tend to think of the reproductive rights movement as starting in the ‘60s or with Roe v. Wade in 1973. It actually goes back a full century earlier, from when Sanger and Dennett formed the birth control movement in the mid-1910s and carried it to its first legal victory in 1936.
I’ve long supported reproductive justice, and becoming a parent only solidified that. Around five years ago, early in my second pregnancy, I was reading a lot about early 20th century feminists and I landed on the story of Mary Ware Dennett. She quickly became the emotional center of my narrative.
Sanger enjoyed fame, she was good at self-mythologizing, and her skills and passion both served the movement well. However, she pursued a narrower goal than Dennett: Sanger’s campaign would ultimately put birth control access in the hands of doctors, who would dispense contraceptives according to their own judgment and preferences, while Dennett wanted birth control access to be free of any gatekeeping, even by the medical establishment.
It was remarkable to go through Dennett’s archives and realize how fiercely private she was in contrast to Sanger, how she shunned publicity when she was working on this very bold campaign for birth control and revolutionizing sex education on the side.
Dennett had a powerful and deeply American vision for taking birth control from a place of silence, of taboo and restriction, to a place of open, affordable access. She was driven by events in her own life, and by an abiding belief in the full citizenship of women.
Learning about her, and how influential she was on Sanger, made me want to push back against the Famous Person format of retelling history. Too often, conspicuous leadership and well-resourced charisma are valued at the expense of more impactful forces, of relationships and rivalries and efforts that failed, but were nevertheless, visionary.
The title was surprisingly easy! For my first book, Citizen Reporters, there was much more back and forth with the publishing team. For The Icon and the Idealist, my publisher suggested I come up with something along the lines of “The X and the Y,” and very quickly it fell into place.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: The guiding hand for my research was my curiosity about what cultural factors affected the rise of the birth control movement, and a basic human nosiness about what Sanger and Dennett may have been like as people.
Early on, I spent a great deal of time in institutional archives like the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Sophia Smith Library at Smith College, trawling through papers and artifacts left by my two main characters.
In 2020, that pleasant routine was disrupted by the pandemic. Institutional archives shut down to non-affiliates. That prompted me to reach out to Dennett’s descendants, and I began a series of visits to Dennett family archives in New Hampshire and Utah.
Making contact with the curator of the Dennett Family Archives, Sharon Spaulding, was a spectacular stroke of luck. Through her, I was even able to interview one of Dennett’s grandchildren, Nancy Dennett. Sharon’s generosity and wisdom truly made the book possible.
Another heroic resource was a research librarian at the Providence Public Library. She waived the typical limits on interlibrary loans and helped me get hold of boxes of microfilm and hundreds of secondary sources, from articles to dissertations to books of all stripes.
We tend to think of research as a solitary undertaking, and I do enjoy being alone with a box of old letters, but researching this book was a real joy because of the collaborations with experts, descendants, and librarians along the way.
Q: The writer Megan Marshall said of the book, “There is no time like the present for Stephanie Gorton’s brilliantly conceived dual biography of the fiercely formidable women, Mary Ware Dennett and Margaret Sanger, who brought the fight for reproductive rights to the American public in the early twentieth century.” What do you think of that description?
A: That description means a lot to me because of the person who wrote it. Megan Marshall’s books have not only taught me so much, but kept me spellbound at the same time.
Recently I found a fan email I sent her after reading The Peabody Sisters 10 years ago. I wrote something along the lines of How did you do that? And she wrote, “Find out what happened when, in a very precise way, and then set the story going!” I still tell myself that all the time.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Sanger and Dennett, and what do you see as their legacies today?
A: The best single-word descriptor for their dynamic is probably “fraught.” But to expand on that, it’s important to note that early on, they had a warm and sympathetic relationship.
They most likely first met in 1914 when Sanger gave a lecture to members of the Heterodoxy club, a secretive feminist collective in Greenwich Village; Dennett was part of the crowd.
Sanger was frustrated and disappointed with most of the women she met that day–she criticized them as being obliviously privileged, and not engaging with issues that affected the working class–but Dennett was an exception. She and Sanger had lunch together and discovered there was much common ground between their values and ambitions.
Later on, the differences between their personalities and their methods made it impossible for them to keep working together.
Dennett had a somewhat rigid idea of how activism ought to be done: she opposed breaking law to drum up publicity and test cases in the courts, for example.
Sanger, meanwhile, thought Dennett was a bourgeois rule-follower. It stung her that Dennett made headway in trying to change the federal law in the years she lobbied in Washington, though otherwise Sanger, who was much better funded and had great natural charisma, occupied the predominant position in the birth control movement.
Both Dennett and Sanger launched very ambitious, very flawed campaigns. They took detours into the eugenics movement, presented birth control as a remedy for Depression-era poverty, and tried to bend pop-culture trends to muster momentum for the cause.
Today their legacies can be felt not only in current efforts to legislate reproductive rights, both in the courts and in Congress, but also in how we talk about fertility control. Particularly with Dennett, I see her legacy in current arguments for reproductive freedom as a prerequisite for women to have full and equal citizenship.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My next project is still very much in the playing-with-ideas phase. As it develops, I’m doing some freelance editorial work. I used to be a full-time editor, and I loved it; it’s the kind of job that sparks ideas all the time, while also being rigorous and taking you into subject areas you might never have explored unbidden.
Being an editor is what first made me curious about whether I could write, and now, as an author, having gone through the editorial process has given me a new respect for the craft that goes into editing. It’s such a privilege to be trusted with someone’s manuscript.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I love hearing from readers, and I hope anyone with interest in the book will come say hi at an event! My website is stephaniegorton.com.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Interview: Stephanie Gorton, Author of “Citizen Reporters”
The Providence-based writer's new book tracks the rise and fall of one of the most significant magazines in American history.
February 20, 2020
Casey Nilsson
Citizen Reporters is published by the HarperCollins imprint, Ecco.
In the preface to Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine That Rewrote America, author Stephanie Gorton includes a quote by Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Gorton’s compelling new book, which tracks the rise and fall of one of the most significant magazines in American history, is set in the Gilded Age. At the time, the country was plagued by income inequality. Corporations had little regard for their labor force. The president crucified journalists at every opportunity, and distrust in the media was sowed.
After the 2016 election, “Parallels that weren’t so perceptible before really seemed obvious,” says Gorton, who lives in Providence with her family and began working on the book in 2013. “It’s not at all why I got into it, but it did allow the word to get out about it.”
Instead, Gorton was drawn to the inner lives and public personas of journalists S.S. McClure and Ida Tarbell of McClure’s Magazine — an unlikely pairing that changed the country, and journalism, forever.
“I always had interest in the Gilded Age and kept finding their stories as sub-plots in other books,” says Gorton, who maintained a career in book publishing while she worked on Citizen Reporters. “I really wanted a book about just them.”
Author Stephanie Gorton. Photo credit: Rachel Hulin
Through primary source materials, biographies and interviews, Gorton learned McClure was an Irish immigrant raised in destitution by a single mother; Ida Tarbell, whose family found financial security in the oil region of Pennsylvania, aspired to a life outside the home. McClure was frenetic and social; Tarbell “just wanted to be left to do her work,” says Gorton. “She had very timeless principles about how she went about it.”
The investigative reporter who took on the Rockefellers and Standard Oil originally planned to be a scientist and she applied the same principals of curiosity and objectivity to her journalism.
“She would always start out on a basis that there was something to be learned,” Gorton says.
McClure — who launched his namesake magazine in 1893 at the age of twenty-six — plucked Tarbell, his star writer, out of obscurity. “There are very few people with that true editorial genius that you can think of,” says Gorton.
But his passion gave way to volatility — particularly in the face of attacks from the president — which shattered staff confidence and led to a mass resignation. Financial troubles befell the magazine and, by 1911, the McClure’s as America knew it was over. It was rebranded as a women’s magazine, then folded for good in 1929.
Although their publication didn’t stand the test of time, Gorton says McClure and Tarbell inspired generations of writers, herself included.
“It was really affirming, I have to say. I reached a point where, working as an editor, you’re always deluged with work and reading and manuscripts,” she says. “You wonder, ‘What is even the function of a person who is in this line of work? Are these stories even going to make a difference?’ ”
But, more than 100 years after the fact, Ida Tarbell and S.S. McClure taught her just how much they can.
Attend a launch party for Citizen Reporters on February 21 at 6 p.m. at Symposium Books, 240 Westminster St., Providence. A reading is also scheduled for March 26 at Savoy Bookshop, 10 Canal St., Westerly. Pick up or order a copy at your local independent bookstore and all major bookselling platforms. stephaniegorton.com
Byline: Dennis Drabelle
"Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine That Rewrote America"
By Stephanie Gorton
Ecco. 368 pp. $28.99
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S.S. McClure feared being held back by his "cursed mediocre versatility." Ida Tarbell resolved to be free; it followed, in her mind, that she "must be a spinster." McClure channeled his versatility into founding and editing McClure's magazine, which became a beacon of the American progressive movement. Tarbell gave up a measure of her freedom to join the staff of McClure's, for which she wrote articles that led to the breakup of a corporate behemoth, the Standard Oil Trust. The symbiotic relationship between the mercurial editor and his steadfast reporter is the subject of Stephanie Gorton's smart and illuminating new book, "Citizen Reporters."
S.S. McClure's "cursed" remark came at a low point in his life. There were plenty of those, along with a great many surges of manic activity. In 1866, his newly widowed mother and her four young sons emigrated from Scotland. They settled in Valparaiso, Indiana, just in time for the town's Fourth of July celebration, at which 9-year-old Sam recognized that "here was a young country for Youth." Reflecting on Sam's years at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, a classmate said he'd "seldom seen so much enthusiasm and life in such a small carcass." The small carcass was soon pouring its enthusiasm into editing the campus newspaper.
After graduation, McClure moved to Boston, where he drew upon a connection with a bicycle mogul. A stint as a cycling instructor (the high-wheeled models of those days were hard to master) led to his appointment as editor of a new magazine called the Wheelman.
Tarbell graduated from Allegheny College, less than 30 miles from her hometown, Titusville, Pennsylvania. Titusville was an oil town, and her father, an oil producer and refiner, had been ruined there by the machinations of a greedy rival: John D. Rockefeller, later the brains behind the Standard Oil Trust. After two years of teaching school for long hours at low pay, Tarbell was hired as office manager for a magazine published by the Chautauqua Institution. But she sensed that writing was her calling and that a strong woman - Madame Manon Phlipon de Roland, one of the French Revolution's countless stalwarts turned victims - should be her first subject. Tarbell resigned and went off to do research in Paris.
McClure had meanwhile moved to New York and gone to work in the print shop of the Century, a leading general-interest magazine. To serve the growth industry that magazines were at the time, McClure began syndicating clients' articles and fiction in newspapers. After a few hand-to-mouth years, he made a go of this business, thanks in part to his representation of Robert Louis Stevenson,Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Tarbell was making ends meet (barely) by writing articles about France, one of which she submitted to S.S. McClure's syndicate. On a summer day in 1892, she answered a knock at the door to find herself looking at "the most vivid, vital creature that I had ever seen." It was McClure, taking time out from a European trip to sign Tarbell up as a client. Back in the States, McClure realized his dream of starting a magazine, which he persuaded Tarbell to come home and work for. So began a stormy decade and a half in which she doubled as a McClure's staff writer and a McClure whisperer. Better than anyone else, she could save the chief from his worst excesses.
Together with reporters Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens, McClure and Tarbell served up meticulously researched exposés that might spill over into multiple issues. If you're thinking "muckraking," you're on the right track, although the catalyst for President Theodore Roosevelt's use of that slur in 1906 was a McClure's wannabe: William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine, which was running a series called "The Treason of the Senate," by David Graham Phillips. Although Phillips's heavy reliance on rhetoric and innuendo made his work inferior to the painstaking investigations of monopolies and corrupt city governments by McClure's Big Three, the president made no exceptions: Journalists were sowing too much negativity.
Only a few years earlier, McClure had been Roosevelt's guest at the White House. The invitation had come after the president read the January 1903 issue of McClure's, which represented the magazine at its best: "Alongside Miss Tarbell's Oil War chapter and Steffens's exposé of corruption in Minneapolis," Gorton writes, "Baker published his fourth dispatch from the labor unrest in Pennsylvania coal country." Appearing in the same glorious issue, however, was a "singsong poem" by an unknown 25-year-old named Florence Wilkinson.
Swatting away complaints from his staff, McClure continued to publish Wilkinson, and it soon became clear why: They were having an affair. Fearing exposure and disgrace, McClure - a married man - turned to Tarbell for help, which she gave. But the affair dragged on, and the breaking point came when the frantic McClure decided all would be well if he started a second magazine, McClure's Universal Journal - at a time when McClure's plain and simple was losing money because of rising publishing costs. And that wasn't all. In a protracted fit of megalomania, McClure wanted to branch out into banking, insurance, a university and a planned town.
Tarbell warned him she would have nothing to do with these ridiculously grandiose schemes, but he persisted. On May 10, 1906, Tarbell "cleaned [out her desk] and left." Not only did S.S. McClure's grand illusions go nowhere; the chief himself was eventually forced out of his namesake magazine. In the late 1920s, Hearst bought McClure's and merged it with another magazine. In 1931, the combined journal folded.
Tarbell became a freelance writer, lecturer and inspiration to ambitious women. In a commencement speech at her alma mater, she championed imagination for its ability to save "the average girl . . . from an imitative life." Far from imitating anything, in their heyday she and McClure, with help from Baker and Steffens, showed America and the world something new: the power of long-form investigative reporting.
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Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Book World, is completing a book on Frederick Law Olmsted and the national parks.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Drabelle, Dennis. "Book World: America needed their journalism; they needed each other." Washington Post, 21 Feb. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A614574587/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fecc8c3f. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
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Gorton, Stephanie. Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America. New York: Harper Collins, 2020. Pp. 368, $28.99.
In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner authored The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, a novel that used satire to define the late nineteenth century in the United States as shaped as much by unbridled greed and corruption as dramatic economic progress. As Americans read the novel, the global economy, as if to acknowledge the book that gave the era its name, had deteriorated into what became known as the Panic of 1873, the largest global financial crisis until the Great Depression. Twenty years later, as Americans once again faced what became known as the Panic of 1893, readers first encountered a subversive new magazine entitled McClure's which aimed to use investigative reporting, rather than humor, to uncover the era's most pressing political, economic, and social issues. Stephanie Gorton's Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America provides accessible biographies of two of the magazine's primary figures to illustrate McClure's seminal role in creating Progressive Era journalism.
Along with economic growth and instability, the decades after the Civil War also brought a more literate American population and the rapid increase in popular magazines-575 in 1860 to around 5,000 in 1895. An impoverished Irish immigrant whose mercurial personality was responsible for both his successes and failures, Samuel S. McClure was an unlikely candidate to create one of these magazines that at one point had over 400,000 subscribers and, as Gorton claims, "defined the muckraking movement" (3). McClure did not author any of the magazine stories, but Citizen Reporters suggests that he had an uncanny eye for discerning the issues, and words, that resonated with Americans. He also recruited and supported tenacious investigative reporters such as Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker whose articles exposed many of the social ills that later came to define the challenges of Progressive Era reform. At the same time, McClure's, which initially cost only 15 cents an issue, also published the work of such literary figures as Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Willa Cather.
If McClure was an unpredictable and often unrealistic visionary whose personal problems ultimately led to the demise of the magazine, Tarbell served as the anchor that held much of McClure's together during its peak between 1893 and 1906. Born in the Pennsylvania oil region and witness to the unprecedented success and social costs of Standard Oil Company's monopoly, Tarbell started with biographies of such historical figures as Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln before authoring, after years of research, the groundbreaking series, "The History of Standard Oil." Tarbell rejected convention that restricted middle class women to marriage, teaching, or nursing and instead traveled to Paris to write and, upon accepting McClure's offer to join his staff as a full-time journalist, forged a career investigating the countless economic and political injustices of a rapidly modernizing America. Although Tarbell's ambivalent stance toward feminism and women's suffrage deserves far more attention, Gorton's portrait is clear as to Tarbell's commitment to using the pen to fight the increasingly problematic role of wealth and power. The Gilded Age may have been fodder for humor for writers such as Twain, but for Tarbell, the period was, as she declared years later, "dripped in blood" with clear lines between the forces of good and evil (57).
In contrast to standard historical surveys and recent books such as Doris Kearns Goodwin's prize-winning, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of American Journalism (2013), Citizen Reporters illustrates the rise of Progressive reform from the perspectives of the writers and editors themselves. Gorton includes the role of Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, and other elites, but the best parts of the book explore the commitment of McClure, Tarbell, and their talented colleagues to craft an unprecedented form of journalism that combined rigorous field research, analysis, and activism for a new age. Gorton's account reminds teachers of the Progressive Era of the value of having students examine the accessible digital archives of McClure's. For example, the 1902 volume alone included the first chapter in Tarbell's scathing portrait of Standard Oil, a piece from Lincoln Steffens on political corruption in St. Louis that he later published as a book entitled, The Shame of the Cities (1904), and an account of the lengthy coal strike in Pennsylvania from John Mitchell, the president of the United Mine Workers. Other volumes of the period included Ray Stannard Baker's insightful and often intimate reports on familiar topics such as the nationwide Pullman Strike, Coxey's Army, and the Spanish-American War. Baker's 1905 series, "What is a Lynching? A Study of Mob Justice, South and North," remains a groundbreaking case study of community, culture, and racial violence in Georgia and Ohio that both challenged persistent assumptions about race and region and foreshadowed many of the race riots of the next decade.
Many instructors will find the last portion of Citizen Reporters, as Gorton describes the demise of the magazine and the later years of McClure and Tarbell, less valuable and, at times, frustratingly incomplete. Both McClure and Tarbell lived during the Great Depression, yet Gorton provides little hint as to how these two pivotal reformers interpreted the New Deal and its challengers. Regardless, the book's well-written account of the pinnacle of muckraking journalism will enrich familiar classroom discussions of the battles of Progressive Era reform. As Tarbell wrote in her first installment of the history of Standard Oil,
... this history of the Standard is enough to show that although
written from documents and with entire fidelity to facts, it is more
than a mere record, that it is a great human drama, the story of thirty
years of bitter, persistent warfare between the advocates of the two
great commercial principles of our day--competition and
combination.... It is a story of daring action, of bold projects ably
realized, of heart-breaking tragedies--a story in which the shape of
new conditions of business life in America are illustrated as in no
other of which we know (McClure's, Volume 19, November 1902, p. 592).
Despite the limitations of biography to capture the complexity of social forces that shaped the era, Citizen Reporters provides students and teachers of history with an unique and instructive sense of the "great human drama" and "persistent warfare" that lay behind both the most vexing of the period's social problems and the unprecedented efforts of writers to right the wrongs of a modernizing America.
Illinois State University
Richard Hughes
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Emporia State University
http://www.emporia.edu/socsci/journal/main/htm
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Hughes, Richard. "Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America." Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, vol. 46, no. 1, spring 2021, pp. 37+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A662210729/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d2e8abac. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America
Stephanie Gorton. Ecco, $27.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-279664-6
Socially conscious journalism and colorful personalities stimulate each other in this meandering portrait of a Progressive Era magazine. Journalist Gorton recounts the heyday of McClure's (roughly 1893 to 1906), which gained a then-massive circularion exceeding 400,000 for its fiction by legends including Willa Cather and Robert Louis Stevenson and its investigative reporting on strikes, business monopolies, racial lynchings, municipal corruption, and other controversies. President Theodore Roosevelt celebrated the magazine's reformist zeal, then denounced its "muckraking" after the magazine's reporting made trouble for him. Gorton's narrative revolves around biographies of Ida Tarbell, a pioneering female journalist whose sensational expose of Standard Oil sparked antitrust action, and founder Samuel Sidney McClure, a brilliant manic-depressive with a gift for spotting great writers and sowing chaos with grandiose schemes. (McCiure's was crippled when a plan to start a second publication--and perhaps an insurance company, bank, mail-order university, and company town to boot--provoked mass resignations.) Gorton wants to capture an evanescent group alchemy of journalism at McCiure's, with McClure inspiring and supporting Tarbell's investigations and Tarbell stabilizing the erratic McClure, but her case for a unique McCiure's culture that wouldn't flourish under steadier management is unconvincing. The result is a miscellany of profiles and anecdotes, some more revealing than others, without a unifying theme. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 36, 9 Sept. 2019, p. 54. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A600790128/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=412114a1. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Gorton, Stephanie CITIZEN REPORTERS Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $28.99 2, 18 ISBN: 978-0-06-279664-6
A history of McClure's magazine, its publisher, and its most important contributor.
While employed on the editorial side of magazines and book publishing, Gorton began wondering about the motivations and interpersonal dynamics of writers and editors. When she discovered a century-old professional relationship between magazine publisher Samuel Sidney McClure and his star writer, Ida Minerva Tarbell, she began to conduct research for this book. Both born in 1857, McClure and Tarbell met in 1892 as he sought to hire her for the editorial staff of his nascent, eponymous monthly magazine. That magazine would become hugely successful from 1893 until about 1906, when internal and external forces caused a decline, leading to eventual closure. In Gorton's wide-ranging book, the magazine does not make its debut until nearly 100 pages in. Before that, the author lays out a dual biography, alternating chapters between the two outsized personalities. While McClure was restless, Tarbell was steadier in nature. Gorton conducted primary documents research in archives filled with papers from McClure (mostly in Indiana) and Tarbell (mostly in Pennsylvania). The author also cites liberally from a previous McClure biography as well as two previous Tarbell biographies and her memoir, All in a Day's Work, originally published in 1939. Tarbell's fame rests largely on her accomplishments as a muckraking woman journalist in the male-dominated industry while McClure was well known for his ability to lead "by enthusiasm, rather than by example." The best-known content--an expose of Standard Oil Company and John D. Rockefeller researched and written by Tarbell--appeared in installments published between 1902 and 1904 and was later published in 1904 as The History of the Standard Oil Company. Though Gorton offers a sturdy portrait of Tarbell and McClure for a new generation of readers, much of the information she provides has already appeared in previous books and historical journals. The author variously refers to Tarbell as "Miss Tarbell," "Ida Tarbell," or simply "Ida," which becomes distracting.
An adequate resource for readers new to this piece of the history of American journalism.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Gorton, Stephanie: CITIZEN REPORTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A605549421/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7fb09d60. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine That Rewrote America. By Stephanie Gorton. Feb. 2020.384p. Ecco, $27.99 (97800627966461.051.
Popular magazines in America's Gilded Age conducting socially progressive, in-depth investigations so enraged President Theodore Roosevelt that he infamously condemned even the most diligent journalists as muckrakers. He was particularly outraged by McClures, the brainchild of ambitious, visionary, and increasingly erratic Irish immigrant Samuel Sidney McClure. The influential magazine thrived in large part due to the grit and genius of writer and pioneering journalist Ida Tarbell, who came of age, "studious and headstrong," in the Allegheny River Valley. In her finely sourced and lively first book, Gorton tells the complex, entwined stories of these two ardent innovators and their temperamental differences, symbiotic friendship, and reverberating achievements. Productively charming and disastrously chaotic, McClure had his finger on the publics pulse and a keen eye for talent. Steadfast Tarbell rejected society's shackling gender restrictions to embrace meaningful work, becoming the "lifeblood of McClure's" via such courageous and meticulous works as her resounding expose of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Including incisive portraits of other McClure's journalists, Gorton's fresh and vivid biographical history ultimately affirms the essential role an independent press of conscience plays in our democracy.--Donna Seaman
** Women in Focus: The IB111 in 2020
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine That Rewrote America." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 11, 1 Feb. 2020, p. 4. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A614529313/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3b4f8d4d. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Gorton, Stephanie THE ICON AND THE IDEALIST Ecco/HarperCollins (NonFiction None) $32.00 11, 26 ISBN: 9780063036291
Two defiant women.
Drawing on considerable archival sources, journalist Gorton creates an informative history of the fight for women's reproductive rights in her dual biography of activists Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Mary Ware Dennett (1872-1947). Dennett came to the cause from her personal experience of accidental pregnancies and birth trauma; Sanger, from work as a visiting nurse among the poor of New York City, where she saw women die after illegal abortions. The two first met in 1902, but although they shared goals, they fell out over the means to attain them. Dennett, Gorton reveals, shunned publicity and preferred to put her efforts into lobbying politicians and physicians; Sanger, a charismatic public speaker and successful fundraiser, relished being in the public eye. They differed, too, over who should hold prescribing privileges for contraceptives, with Sanger insisting that only physicians and nurses should. The women's most stalwart adversary was Anthony Comstock, U.S. Postal Inspector and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Comstock Act of 1873 had made dissemination of information about contraception illegal, punishable by imprisonment. Both women suffered the brunt of that legislation. As Gorton points out, Project 2025, produced by the Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for a future Trump administration, "explicitly states the Comstock Act should be revived and enforced" a dismal prospect at a time when the legal right to contraception is codified in only 13 states. "A woman's body belongs to herself alone," Sanger proclaimed in 1914. "It does not belong to the United States of America or to any other government on the face of the earth. Enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman's right to life and liberty."
A timely contribution to a virulent debate.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Gorton, Stephanie: THE ICON AND THE IDEALIST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883514/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4441c932. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
In "The Icon and the Idealist," Stephanie Gorton tells the story of two women who fought a patriarchal system - and each other.
THE ICON AND THE IDEALIST: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America, by Stephanie Gorton
In the days after Donald Trump's election, abortion pill providers were inundated with orders for Mifepristone and Misoprostol.
This desire to hoard is not only understandable but just plain smart; the new national prescription is quite clear. In 2023, JD Vance, the vice president-elect, suggested their administration would resurrect the Comstock Act - the long-dormant federal law that makes it unlawful to put abortifacients in the mail.
If Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Mary Ware Dennett (1872-1947) knew that their nemesis Anthony Comstock, the anti-vice crusader and longtime U.S. postal inspector, still had the power to threaten American women's reproductive rights in the year 2024, they would be spinning in their respective graves.
In her gripping double biography of these two foremothers of the American birth control movement, "The Icon and the Idealist," Stephanie Gorton skillfully depicts the grueling decades-long struggle of Sanger (the icon, in this telling) and Dennett (the idealist) to make birth control available and legal.
Gorton, a journalist and writer, delivers a suspenseful recounting of the two activists' myriad campaigns, trials and imprisonments as they battled the country's puritanical leadership, their commitment to saving women's lives nothing short of heroic. It is also a haunting reminder that, a century later, women are still battling the entrenched forces of misogyny.
The author also describes the painful, destructive rivalry between her two subjects with narrative nuance and scholarly acumen. Using previously unpublished letters and manuscripts, she offers the reader an emotionally palpable glimpse into the culture clash between the feminist movement and the patriarchal, recalcitrant political establishment - as well as the struggle between the ideological allies Sanger and Dennett.
Sanger's story has passed into legend. On a hot summer day in 1912, as she told it, she rushed to a tenement in Lower Manhattan in response to a call from a panicked husband trying to revive his unconscious wife, injured by a self-induced abortion. When a doctor successfully revived Sadie Sachs, the couple asked him how they could prevent another pregnancy. "Tell Jake to sleep on the roof," replied the doctor. Three months later, Sanger returned to the same apartment to find that same mother of three in a coma, having attempted the same procedure. This time, Sachs died, and Sanger became radicalized.
Even Mary and William Hartley Dennett, a college-educated Massachusetts couple, knew little about the basic mechanics of fertility. After Mary nearly died while giving birth to her third child in 1905, the family's doctor informed them that another pregnancy would risk her life. But the doctor neglected to give the Dennetts any information about contraception. "I was utterly ignorant of the control of conception, as was my husband also," wrote Dennett, years later. After years of forced abstinence, the Dennetts divorced and Mary moved to New York to work for the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Even though his mother had bled to death after giving birth to her 10th child when he was a little boy, Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) abhorred anything that limited a woman's "sacred duty" of motherhood. After he was installed as the first chief agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock arrested abortionists and banned newspapers, books, photographs and art that contained any sex or nudity.
Reeling from a corruption scandal and seeking redemption, Congress passed Comstock's censorious bill in 1873. The Comstock Act prohibited mailing anything considered obscene, including medical devices used for birth control and abortion or written references to the same. What followed was decades of what Gorton terms "a great silencing," as this federal law "dealt a chilling blow to free speech."
Undeterred by the vice police and hellbent on helping women control their fertility, Sanger edited a militant monthly publication called The Woman Rebel in which she published information about birth control options as well as her manifesto - deemed radical for declaring simply that a woman's body "belongs to herself alone. It does not belong to the United States of America." Enforced motherhood, she went on, "is the most complete denial of a woman's right to life and liberty."
The Woman Rebel presented a direct challenge to the Comstock Act, and in 1914 agents arrested Sanger and charged her with four counts of criminal violations of the act. Rather than face trial and a potential 40-year sentence, Sanger fled the country.
While Sanger was in exile in London, a group of suffragists, Socialists and settlement house workers, including Mary Dennett, founded the National Birth Control League in March 1915, with the goal of repealing both the New York State and federal Comstock laws.
When Sanger returned to the United States a year later to face trial, she expected to be embraced by the league. She wasn't. In the first salvo of a power struggle that would define their relationship for decades, Dennett showed Sanger the door.
Unbowed, in 1916 Sanger opened the country's first birth control clinic in the poor, immigrant neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn. On their first day of operation, a line of more than 100 women, many accompanied by husbands and children, snaked around the block.
The clinic stayed open for nine days and served 464 patients before the police blocked the doors and arrested Sanger and her staff for violating state obscenity laws. She stood trial, was convicted and served 30 days in a workhouse in Queens.
A year before women gained the right to vote, Dennett moved to Washington and began the uphill battle of lobbying a hostile Congress to delete the contraception section from the Comstock Act. As if Dennett didn't have enough trouble getting through to the squeamish, dismissive representatives, her efforts were soon undermined by Sanger, who began lobbying for an entirely different bill.
Sanger and Dennett had almost nothing in common. Sanger was attractive and glamorous. Dennett was homely and unassuming. Sanger had romantic affairs with men on both sides of the Atlantic, and married a rich one who funded her life and activism. Dennett lived alone in a walk-up in Queens.
In an unfortunate show of accord, both saw the political advantage of partnering with the popular racist, anti-immigration eugenics movement. Sanger wooed them more aggressively than Dennett, and as a result, tarnished her legacy. (Planned Parenthood took Sanger's name off their Manhattan clinic in 2020.)
Eventually, victory for both women and the movement came not with legislation, but from dramatic legal verdicts. In 1930, an appeals court ruled that Dennett's distribution of her explicit sex education pamphlet, "The Sex Side of Life," did not violate the Comstock Act's obscenity laws.
Seven years later, Sanger's victory in United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries dealt another blow to the Comstock Act by allowing doctors to obtain contraceptive devices through the mail.
As if to prove that progress never trends in a straight line, Gorton's riveting history of the first movement to grant women control over their bodies is essential reading now more than ever.
THE ICON AND THE IDEALIST: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America | By Stephanie Gorton | Ecco | 458 pp. | $32
Clara Bingham's most recent book is "The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973."
PHOTOS: Margaret Sanger in 1934, left, and Mary Ware Dennett in 1930. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ASSOCIATED PRESS; BETTMANN, VIA GETTY IMAGES) This article appeared in print on page BR12.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 International Herald Tribune
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Bingham, Clara. "Birth Control's (First) Civil War." International New York Times, 28 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A821499303/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=62e78331. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.